Nanochip, Inc., a
Silicon Valley startup, has managed to raise $14 million in funding
from Intel Capital, Intel's global investment organization, for further
development of the MEMS technology.

You read it right: gigabytes, not gigabits.

According
to Nanochip (PDF), the technology isn't lithography constrained, allowing
production of chips of more than 1GB in capacity, in plants that have
already been deemed outdated by current standards.

The lack of
lithography constraints means cheaper products, resulting in an
opportunity to also replace flash memory, as the technology is also
non-volatile.

Today's factories should be able to produce the
first products, estimated at 100GB per chip, when the technology is
expected to be unleashed for public consumption by 2010. The first
samples will be available during 2009.

PRAM,
or phase change memory, was expected to be the technology to replace
flash in the coming years, since it is also non-volatile, while it is
much faster than flash. As Intel found out over the last few years, PRAM doesn't seemed to scale so well,
in regards to density, and still has some boundaries to overcome --
namely it's thermal principles of operation.

Nanochip's details of the technology are ambiguous at best, though what is known is that the company is working on hybrid micro-electric-mechanical -- the partnership with Intel suggests a PRAM connection too. The company has described this as a very small platter coated in chalcogenide is dragged beneath hundreds of thousands of electrical probes which can read and write the
chalcogenide. Casual estimates put this sort of density at one terabit per square inch, or 125GB per square inch.

The company has not disclosed access speeds. That's a
place where PRAM is appointed to be the undisputed king of the hill, so
it could limit applications of this type of technology.

For
now it seems that the flash SSD drives are going to be replaced before
they even reach mass consumption -- which is a good thing. The
technology is expensive, doesn't provide a lot of storage space and is
prone to failure, due to the low amount of write cycles available per
cell. Flash is perfect for pendrives and resisting shock, not so good
for regular, intensive, HDD usage.

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

You really should re-read the article then, maybe read the links too for additional information.

It's a replacement to the flash chips used in Solid State Drives (SSD). This should allow much larger capacities and longer life, as well as faster read/write times write times. Read/Write on flash is not on par with hard drives yet, seems to be some technical limitations to work out.